Senior Manager, DevOps and Engineering Support

Appian Corporation•McLean, VA

About The Position

Here at Appian, our values of Intensity and Excellence define who we are. We set high standards and live up to them, ensuring that everything we do is done with care and quality. We approach every challenge with ambition and commitment, holding ourselves and each other accountable to achieve the best results. When you join Appian, you’ll be part of a passionate team dedicated to accomplishing hard things, together. Platform Engineering is scaling rapidly, with features being developed across four continents. Without a dedicated support organization enforcing operational hygiene, the gap between shipping features and supporting them in production will become unsustainable. This role is the keystone hire that sets the direction for how we operationalize platform reliability at scale.

Requirements

Proven experience building and leading a DevOps or Tier 2/Tier 3 operational support team (not just managing one — building one from scratch)
7+ years in DevOps, SRE, or production operations, with at least 3 years in a people leadership role at the senior manager level or above
7+ years in Software Engineering with a proven track record of delivery
Deep experience defining operational onboarding standards — runbooks, documentation gates, deployment checklists — for multi-team engineering organizations
Hands-on familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS strongly preferred), Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code
Must be a US Citizen or US Permanent Resident

Nice To Haves

Strong experience supporting distributed systems at scale, including incident response and recovery coordination
Experience working across globally distributed teams and time zones
Experience with FedRAMP, GovCloud, or other restricted deployment environments

Responsibilities

Build and lead a team of approximately 11 engineers focused on Tier 2 operational support for platform engineering services running in Appian Cloud
Define and enforce onboarding requirements for new features entering production, including runbooks, operational scripts, and support documentation
Establish operational standards and processes that ensure no feature ships without proper support readiness — regardless of where it was built
Serve as the escalation path beyond Tier 1/Solutions Engineering for complex incidents and infrastructure recovery efforts
Partner with infrastructure and development teams in Chennai, the US, Europe, and Australia to ensure features are supportable and well-documented
Drive operational hygiene across the platform, closing gaps in feature supportability for existing services
Manage deployments and operational access for restricted environments (e.g., FedRAMP/GovCloud) where development teams lack direct access
Mentor team members on DevOps best practices, incident management, and operational maturity